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Rumor: Verizon to turn on carrier billing for the Google Play Store tomorrow

Buying things online isn’t exactly a walk in the park. You have to enter in your credit card number, your address, your phone number, and a whole bunch of other personal information. Most sites store that data for you so you only have to type it in once, but still, which sites should you trust? Which sites are trying to steal your sensitive data? Here’s where carrier billing comes in. Say you just came home with your first Android smartphone and you want to buy a game from the Google Play Store. With carrier billing, you just hit the “Buy” button and then that purchase will show up on next month’s phone bill. Easy as that.

According to sources who have spoken to Droid Life, Verizon is going to announce that they’re going to support carrier billing starting on October 18th, which is tomorrow. Customers will be able to purchase a maximum of $25 of content using carrier billing per month, which makes a lot of sense since most folks probably aren’t going to spend that much during their billing cycle. What about the other operators? We know AT&T does carrier billing, as do Sprint and T-Mobile. So it’s about time that Verizon jumped on the train!

Looking ahead, we’re curious to see how Google’s relationship with operators evolves when they start taking mobile payments seriously. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon are going to launch a new payments platform called “ISIS” later this month. It competes directly with Google Wallet. Will operators keep on offering their customers carrier billing? Will they want to work out a deal with Google so that customers can buy apps using ISIS? Like we’ve said numerous times in multiple articles, politics is what’s holding back mobile payments, not technology itself.